The general availability of digital media capture tools such as digital cameras, video recorders, audio recorders, and smart phones equipped with one or more of these features, in combination with low-cost digital storage devices, has enabled individuals to quickly amass large collections of digital media. Often, users of these tools would like to share portions of these large media collections with others easily using an efficient presentation. For example, an individual may want to share digital video or digital photographs from a vacation with family or friends. In order to do so efficiently, the individual is faced with the challenge of selecting or boiling down a potentially large collection of video or photographs into a curated or representative summary that includes highlights or important features of the vacation. This manual process can be laborious and time consuming, but is often necessary to cull low quality or duplicative content.
Some tools for digital media organization can arrange groups of images or videos by date, name, or other embedded metadata fields. However, when preparing a slideshow or selecting highlights from a large collection of digital media, a user typically needs to manually select which images or videos from the entire collection will be included in a highlight presentation based on their content, appearance or visual attractiveness. An example of automating the creation of customized multimedia content is described in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2007/0038938. Alternative tools may display a random selection of images, for example as a slide show or screen saver configured to display images from a folder or directory selected by the user.